The British approach took longer. Through cunning diplomacy they managed to divide the rabbit forces into two factions, one of which handed the other to the British.

The Iraqi team went into the forest and failed to re-emerge. Hours passed. The other teams became worried, and started searching for the Iraqis. Eventually they heard the sound of blows. In a clearing they found the Iraqi team, who had captured a deer and tied it to a tree. The Iraqis were beating it, shouting fiercely: "Go on, admit it! Confess you are a rabbit."

To write stories about atrocities in Saddam Hussein's Iraq has always been easy. He became President in 1979 after a bloodbath at the top of the ruling party. In 1988-89 some 182,000 Kurds disappeared.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam's, oversaw their disappearance. When a Kurdish delegation asked him what had happened to them, he shouted angrily: "What is this exaggerated figure of 182,000? It couldn't have been more than a hundred thousand!" The regime takes a certain macho pride in its brutality. Its cameramen have shot film of firing squads in action. The government tackled a crime wave by cutting off the hands of alleged offenders and showing the severed limbs on television. Defectors from Iraqi security forces have disclosed horrific details of torture and mass executions in the prisons.

I used to write extensively about the atrocities, but in the late 1990s I began to have misgivings about their impact. The problem is that they give a distorted view of what is happening in Iraq. The country is obviously run by a very nasty regime. But since the crushing of the rebellions at the end of the Gulf war in 1991, exactly 10 years ago, UN sanctions have killed far more ordinary Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.

Sanctions against Iraq, introduced in 1990, have never been fully understood by the outside world. They are far more rigorous than those imposed on South Africa, Serbia or any other country. They are more an exaggerated version of the old Soviet system of central planning. Under the oil-for-food programme of 1995, all Iraqi government contracts are processed by the UN in New York. Most are examined by a special UN committee, dominated by the US and Britain, which decides if any item has a military use.

Imagine how Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, those protagonists of the free market, would react if any other country in the world were to try to run its economy on these neo-Stalinist lines. They would protest, saying it was a recipe for catastrophe. And they would be right. Over the past decade the Iraqi economy has been destroyed. The reports of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, make no bones about this, saying the oil-for-food programme was never meant "to be a substitute for normal economic activity".

The result of this prolonged economic siege of the Iraqi people has been devastating. This comes through even in the lumbering bureaucratic prose of the latest UN report, which speaks of "pauperisation and growing food insecurity". Nobody even knows if the food Iraqis are eating will keep them alive, because the UN sanctions committee in New York has held up contracts for food-testing equipment. Mr Annan politely urges "the early release of these holds to facilitate the provision of safe food to the Iraqi people".

Because of the central control of New York, the Iraqi government cannot perform day-to-day maintenance. So the oil industry, electric power system and water supply are collapsing. Some 90 per cent of raw sewage goes into the rivers from which people drink. In the stifling heat of the Mesopotamian plain, hospitals have limited electric power.

A few years ago I was travelling through villages north of Baghdad. Farmers would take out old, dusty X-rays of children suffering from long-term illnesses, taken before the Gulf war, and show them to me hopefully as if I could make an instant diagnosis. They explained that there was nowhere they could have gone to get another X-ray since the war.

In Baghdad, I visited the al-Khatin hospital for infectious diseases, where Hussein Ali-Majhoul, an eight-month-old with meningitis, was unconscious. Deraid Obousy, his doctor, pointed to an empty oxygen bottle and told me: "It is in the hands of God. We don't have any more oxygen in the hospital and we don't have money to hire a truck to pick up a new one from the factory that refills them on the other side of Baghdad."

The reason why Hussein and other Iraqi babies die is well-known. Mr Annan admitted that the sanctions regime has led to "the worsening of a humanitarian crisis". Only Peter Hain, the Foreign Office minister with responsibility for Iraq, has the gall to claim that the Iraqi government has lots of money and wonders: "Why do we still see pictures of malnourished and sick children?"

© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

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